Cross comparison of fatigue lifetime testing on silicon thin film specimens

This paper reports the comparison among the results obtained by various types of testing for evaluating fatigue lifetime of silicon specimens, performed in 6 institutions in Japan. The experiment covers a variety of single crystal silicon (SCS) specimens fabricated on the same SOI wafers with 5 μm device layer thickness as well as additional specimens made separately in some institutions. In summary, although their initial strength under monotonically increasing load was reported ranging from 2 GPa to 8 GPa depending on the designs, fatigue lifetime was observed with a unique trend which can be well formulated on the basis of Paris´ law to describe equivalent fatigue crack extension process.